Young Writers Society

LMSing as a Rogue.

Not a hundred percent sure what a realistic weekly word goal is for me? Considering school and maybe job and a bazillion other things including the fact that a snail writes faster than me--how about 500 words a week? That's roughly one page in my google doc and should be low pressure enough that I can stick with it :')

Project Overview

The WIP I'm working on is one I just picked up again after--months because i have commitment issues~

Not totally sure what the genre is yet. There will be action and there will be drama. Sort of an urban dystopian flare? There may or may not be magic, there may or may not be romance. Prob some queer representation because that's what my characters do. Heists and rebels and misplaced loyalties and a very short and sassy redhead who's gonna give edgy boi an identity crisis. Probably.

Real quick, going to say this will probably be rated 16+ for mild swearing and for violence. If any weekly portion goes worse than that I'll leave a note at the top of it.

Some tags that I'll update as the story takes more shape, cuz I didn't know what all to put when I first made the thread lol
dystopian ~ action/adventure ~ light sci-fi ~ light urban fantasy? ~ speculative fiction

Feel free to leave comments in the thread! I'm not looking for a lot of critique until the first draft is actually done, but if you see like--an egregious plot hole or a dropped thread or something, please do let me know XD

Playlist in progress~

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/22EjneXMHPZd2I8IxOVEGY?si=431fa1bceb0942e4

Log: Day 1
Sept. 5, 2022
820 words

Alright, I've already got a tiny bit of this story written, so I'm going to post that here and start my week one word count from what follows. Again, probably like 16+ for mild swearing and a fair bit of violence. So--here's my untitled WIP...

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ERR! ERR! ERR! ERR!

“Ohhhhh that’s not good.” Maggy slid herself out from under the computer tower. The security alarm kept blaring overhead, not quite loud enough to crack her skull. Oh and whirling red lights, that was a lovely touch. They bathed the computer room in crimson. Like--a whole lotta blood. Do they shoot you for breaking into government systems? she wondered as she clamored to her feet.

Then a door at the other end of the room hissed open and five or six police in full shadow gear slank in.

“That’s a definite maybe.” Maggy ripped a computer chip from the tower and bolted for the back door. A quick glance over her shoulder down the rows of computer systems told her she’d been spotted. The door slid closed on a black visor looking right at her from halfway down the room.

Maggy thumbed the computer chip into her jeans’ pocket and sprinted down the hall. There were sirens and blinking red lights everywhere. But it was fine, all she had to do was retrace her steps. She caught the corner of the wall at the first intersection and whipped herself around it. Four more police blocked her way. “Freeze!” one of them shouted and charged. Maggy stumbled back to the main hall and kept going.

The police from the computer room were only a few steps behind her. She pumped her arms and sprinted a little faster. No muscles burning yet, no shots fired. Focus on the good things, right?

That fleeting thought vaporized when someone jumped from around the next corner and grabbed her.

The policewoman’s hulking arms (woman, was it a woman, it was kinda hard to tell underneath the visors and armored gear) swallowed Maggy and her breath and about ninety-two percent of her vision. Her arms were pinned awkwardly. Her legs flailed and pushed off the floor every time her feet could touch. The policewoman lost her balance. Maggy felt herself dragged along as the woman stumbled backwards, swerved around, leaned forward--caught a glimpse of the white, cinder block wall through a gap beneath the woman’s elbow. She hauled her feet up blindly and gave one, explosive push.

Almost instantly she felt the jarring impact of the policewoman crashing into someone behind. They all fell and someone else fell and someone grunted through their helmet. Maggy was sent rolling across the floor. At some point she stopped, but the alarms overhead kept blaring. Maggy shook her head and slowly started to prop herself up from her stomach. She lifted her head and saw more than half a dozen police knotted up a few paces away and more on their feet behind them.

Oh yeah.

Before one of the police could finish ordering her to stay down, Maggy was on her feet and running. A shot cracked. A spot of white brick just behind her head was pulverized into dust. Definite. Definite definite maybe, maybe definite, definitely. The primally rooted part of her brain that wasn’t tripping over syntax was fortunately the part that was running her limbs. Bullets riveted the brick around her and set her ears ringing and something pinched and she kept going. The police scrambled up and around each other and she gained maybe two seconds.

That was enough. She could see the open vent up ahead, its cover hanging from the wall by a single loosened screw just like she’d left it on her way in. She raced up, her sneakers squeaking, and jumped to reach the lip of the vent.

A red hot pain shot through her bicep and her whole arm went dead. The jolt of her tailbone hitting the floor jarred her skull. "Shit!" She curled briefly over her cradled right arm and forced back a blur of tears to steal a look at the dark, gory stain surrounding a bullet hole in her sleeve. "Shit. Bullet. That's a--hole." The rapid tramp of heavy boots up the hall jerked her head up. With a quick glance up at the vent, she scrambled to her feet and bolted.

Another spray of gunfire pelted the wall just behind her as she took another turn. Bullets bullets bullets. How did she know she wasn't hit again? How did you even get hit and not know it? She held her arm close and threw her thin weight against the push bar of a door with a bright green exit sign above it. The door held firm--she did not.

Her forehead smacked the door gracelessly and sent her stumbling back. She gave her head a shake, then her eyes went wide. "Nooo no no no no." The push bar clicked rapidly as she pumped it. "Lockdown. Okay. Still fine, this is--"

The police rushed into the intersection a few yards away, almost a dozen weapons clicking like metal insects as their barrels leveled at Maggy's chest.

"Very much not fine..."

Log: Day 7
Sept. 11, 2022
798 words
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“Freeze,” one of the police repeated, an unironic, icy edge in his low tone. Maggy started to take a slow, fearful step back, hands out at her sides. “Freeze!” She flinched and her feet planted.

“Okay! Okay, okay, I am.”

The cop gestured at her with his rifle. “Cuff her. Do a search.” As one of the women beside him put up her gun and stepped forward, something further up the hall caught Maggy’s eye.

Somebody.

She almost missed him. His close-fitting outfit was the same pristine white as the cinder walls and he slunk with feline smoothness across the corridor to the next locked door away. It was his shock of black hair that stood out. He glanced down the hall and their gazes met just as the policewoman stepped into Maggy’s personal space and grabbed her wrist. In the time it took the woman to take her cuffs from her belt and ratchet one of them to Maggy’s left wrist, the cat guy had done something to the lock and was pushing past the door into a stream of sunlight.

Maggy’s hazel eyes widened.

Bolt?

Bolt. Just as the policewoman's gloved fingers touched her skin, Maggy tore her arm away and threw a bony shoulder into the woman's much more armored shoulder. It hurt, and the woman barely staggered. With an angry snarl (was that personal? It sounded personal. God, was that Arms?) she forced Maggy's arm back with one hand and scruffed her with an iron grip with the other. "Little bitch!" she seethed through her visor.

Maggy's eyes watered in pain. "Yeah, pretty much." A metal pin clicked in her other hand.

Arms’ head snapped down and instantly her hand flew to the vacant spot on her weapons belt, the spot that up until a few seconds ago had held the gas bomb in Maggy’s palm. Maggy’s pained grin flicked in Arms’ visor—she threw the bomb at their feet.

A pale yellow cloud erupted in the corridor. The police’s muffled shouts blended with the hiss of filtration systems kicking in on their helmets. Arms coughed and opened her watering eyes to see the Maggy’s auburn ponytail vanishing through the fog.

It turned out a person can’t run very far while holding their breath. Or rather, Maggy couldn’t hold her breath very long while sprinting down the gas-filled hall to the door, eyes half closed and burning like she’d rubbed salt into them. The door she’d seen Cat Guy go through wasn’t far. She gasped for air as she threw her weight into it. It flew open. She stumbled through into blinding sunlight and the musty air of a long alley.

She’d come out in a corner wedged between two buildings, her sense of direction shot. Two options: straight or hard right.

Cat was taking a corner far ahead of her. She ran straight.

Shots cracked from behind as she swerved around a blurry dumpster half-way down the alley. No warning this time. She heard bullets ring off the bin.
She tore left at the end of the alley, swiping tears from her stinging eyes. The land opened ahead, more grass than she’d ever seen in any single patch inside the city. The back wall of the computer warehouse barred her left. Beyond that was the end of a high brick wall. Cat sprinted past it, running for the complex’s high, barbed wire fence.

Hopefully he knew what he was doing.

Maggy’s wounded arm throbbed with the force of a tiny sledge hammer as she followed. She pulled it close with a grimace. Shot, she was shot. This wasn’t supposed to be complicated or dangerous, but it’d gone so badly and there was no way she’d be able to explain herself at home.

A bullet whistled just a little too close to her ear.

Maybe explaining herself wouldn’t get the chance to be an issue.

She was closing in on Cat now. He’d stopped at a hole in the fence that’d been hidden by the barrier wall, bent in a crouch and fiddling with something. He looked up—right into her eyes and her heart nearly jumped to her throat. He raised something in his hand and threw it in a silken arc.
It dropped past her left shoulder, a twin swiftly following on her right. They hissed and popped and a dense smoke screen spread behind her. The ratchet of gunfire became erratic.

Maggy squeezed through the gap in the fence just five seconds behind Cat, gingerly guarding her bleeding arm. She emerged into a cracked lot, just in time to see him glance over his shoulder at her as he slipped down another alley between some high, abandoned buildings. With a short, breathless sigh, she stood, briefly looking back, and ran again.

Log: Day 14
Sept. 18, 2022
394 words

A little short, but this week was hecking crazy and busy. Not sure what that means for LMS since I'm going as a rogue? Anywho~ Just a scene idea I'm messing around with, couldn't actually get to the next part of what I've already posted.
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“It’s just…” She twisted the blade of grass between her fingers in the dark, a cold drizzle tapping the heavy pine boughs above them. The night air smelled like clean earth and sap. “Going back’s going to be a problem now, right? I mean, with surveillance and those pictures up all over the place, it just seems like they’re not going to let it go that quickly. Right? You said I should just lay low for awhile until things cool down, but you didn’t mean they’re going to go away, did you?”

He watched the side of her face from where he sat, propped against a rock, stretched out, one knee drawn up to rest his elbow on. She was finally getting scared. “No.”

“Right…” They watched her take a tremulous breath and sigh, nodding slowly to herself. “But…could it be done?”

“Yes. It’s not easy, but we’ve done it before.”

She stared at the blade of grass.

They stared at her.

“What’s the third option?” she asked carefully.

His eyebrow went up. “Third?”

Maggy finally looked at them, head tipped and brow creased seriously. “One, I go back now and get arrested and—whatever it is the Shadows do to you when they catch you on their bad side. Two, I camp out in the woods apparently until further notice from ‘you guys,’ whoever that is, and probably get eaten by a bear.”

They met her brief pause with silence.

“So what’s option three?”

“There is no—" His turn to pause.

Too late to take it back. Evidently, she could stare as hard as they could when she wanted to. They sighed shortly. “Did you have something in mind?”

Flicking them a dissatisfied look as she nervously went back to twisting the blade of grass, she said, “What if I just don’t go back?”

“What about the bears?”

“Well obviously I wouldn’t just hang out in the woods for the rest of my life,” she said, tossing the piece of grass away. “I was thinking maybe you’d show me where it is ‘you guys’ hang out. We’re already mixed up in this together—"

“Which is why we need to clear your name—”

“So I can peacefully re-integrate and remain forever silent, yeah yeah. I’m in over my head, I’m not stupid. I know you’re only fixing this mess for yourself.”

Week 4
543 words
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At the alley she saw them taking another turn, and when she reached the end, they were vanishing into a broken storage building. She kept following, always almost missing them, hearing the police enter the maze of damp pathways with shouts that quickly grew more distant as they tried to find her and couldn’t. Soon the only sounds Maggy heard were her own gritty footfalls and labored breaths echoing off the high ceiling as she jogged into an old shipping warehouse, done in a gritty palette of rust and chipping safety-yellow. A damp breeze gusted through the jungle of bare storage racks, hanging chains, and elevated catwalks, around the rusty carcass of what had once been a pickup truck before it’d been stripped. Cat wasn’t among any of it.

Maggy held her bleeding arm as she walked slowly between the skeletal remains, running her eyes over things searchingly. A damp autumn wind snaked through. At the far end, the gaping warehouse doors had been left open. The industrial district started to drop away swiftly after that. The city was scrunched up in the valley below, high buildings, ordered streets, police stations, education and assignment centers, housing blocks, all a slight variation of the mud-colored smog that belched around the clock from the factories above. But not here. This warehouse and those around it had been shut down ages ago. Now it stood like a petrified sentry overlooking Maggy’s home, doors wide open like the mouth of a cave. The whole building looked aghast.

Maggy paused at the threshold. Besides a cracked lot with broken machinery, there was no where else to go—an old iron railing separated the lot from the cliff on the other side. She doubted Cat had jumped. With a puzzled frown, she started to turn.

The cold edge of a knife touched her throat before she could, the point of another suddenly next to her spine. Maggy stiffened with a startled scream.
“Be smart,” a satin voice said behind her hear, like it was a piece of advice to a six-year-old. “Are you going to run?”

Maggy’s breath was shrinking away from her throat. “Nope.”

“Turn around slowly.”

The point of the knife followed her neck as she did, the other tracing to a new place at her side. Cat held them as firmly and steadily as they held her wide-eyed gaze. Cat’s eyes were a cool steal gray. Blue veins tinged what pale skin showed above the white cloth covering half their face.

“Your name,” Cat finally ordered.

“Margarette Field.” Her voice box scraped against the blade and Maggy tried to force back a shiver.

“Who sent you?”

“N-no one sent me.”

Cat’s voice sharpened with a firmer press of the knife at her waist. “Tell me.”

Maggy flinched away. “I don’t know what you mean!”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Block C?” she answered, having long crossed the lines of stranger danger by now. She shut her eyes and tried not to shake while those blades were pressed to her. Cat didn’t fire another question right away. “I live in Block C and I didn’t know you were in the computer building and the alarms went off and the doors locked but I saw you get out so I followed you and that’s why I’m here and I’m really sorry if that pissed you off.”

Week 5
48 words
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A long pause.

The knife blades pulled away. Maggy opened her eyes as Cat slid just one of the polished weapons into its sheath. Their eyes were still trained on her.

“Be smart,” they warned again quietly, taking a single step back.

Maggy cupped her throat and nodded.